Photos: This Is the Scale of Horror in Egypt

Not everyone has the stomach to see image after image of mutilated bodies, and those photos be exploitive. But it's important to understand the scale of the violence in Egypt in recent days, and it's hard to comprehend just how vast the conflict has been without photos.

The #Cairo tag on Instagram right now is a mix of selfies and gore. The #Rab3a tag is image after image of burned cars and charred streets and rows of bodies. Not everyone has the stomach to see image after image of mutilated bodies, and those photos be exploitive. But it's important to understand the scale of the violence in Egypt in recent days, and it's hard to comprehend just how vast the conflict has been without photos. Here are some that show people searching for their loved ones, and what devoted family members must endure to find the bodies of their dead.

More than 500 people were killed when the Egyptian military raided two pro-Muslim Brotherhood protest sites. One hospital was so packed with badly injured people that those with non-life-threatening wounds had to sit on sidewalks outside, The New Yorker's Joshua Hersh reports. There were so many casualties in Rabaa al-Adawiya, a protest camp so large it was like a mini-village, because military attacked the camps in a way that made it difficult to escape.

The reporter Sharif Kouddous explains that many lists were posted to pillars inside the Iman mosque. They were lists of the dead.

Heba Morayef, head of Human Rights Watch in Egypt, tweets this photo of family members looking through IDs of the dead at the Iman mosque.

It was 95 degrees in Cairo on Thursday. Leila Fadel, Cairo bureau chief for NPR, took this photo of blocks of ice being brought to the Iman mosque to put on the bodies.

The ice being put on the wrapped bodies by family members, Kouddous tweets.

The biological reality that our bodies begin to decay immediately after death is inescapable. The smell of death was heavy in the mosque, Kouddous said. People sprayed air freshener to mask it, Fadel said.

At least 10 bodies at the Iman mosque were burned, Morayef explains, because a room that held dead bodies in a field hospital was set on fire. On Instagram, there are many graphic photos of charred bodies.